GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[chiguireitor]

Everyone is talking about i3 fans and heatsinks, and i'm just here...



Getting some dust and waiting for some BM1385 love

PS: The pod idea of a BM1385 with old CPU sinks+fans rocks!

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[AJRGale]

If you want to build a waterblock setup for a $40 miner, sure. I'll be playing with some CPU coolers to see what the various clearance requirements are. Screwed down would be better than the crappy little snap-ons (I've never liked those). I'm still at the very beginning of the electricals and haven't really thought about starting on mechanicals so I'm not at all sure what's possible yet. I just know what I want to do.

And I don't really want to build a socketed chipboard.

Or one could build an appropriately dimensioned tank and dunk a buttload of'em in Novec 7100.

mmm, sweet smell of methoxy-nonafluorobutane in the morning..

[QuintLeo]

It would be nice if they were set up for use of Intel OR AMD HS/Fan. Only would take 4 more holes in the board and a bit of care with the layout, and it wouldn't even be a NEW concept.

 Be even nicer if it had the holes for the old Swiftech 370 / Alpha 8045 type heatsinks, but those weren't really common and dunno how many folks kept them around after their Athlon Thunderbird/XP machines died.

[aarons6]

It would be nice if they were set up for use of Intel OR AMD HS/Fan. Only would take 4 more holes in the board and a bit of care with the layout, and it wouldn't even be a NEW concept.

 Be even nicer if it had the holes for the old Swiftech 370 / Alpha 8045 type heatsinks, but those weren't really common and dunno how many folks kept them around after their Athlon Thunderbird/XP machines died.

prob intel. those are square.. the amd is not.

if he made it the same hole spacing as the core2 or i3/5/7 series (the core2 is smaller than the i3/5/7) you can pick up the stock HS/F for like 5$ used and those are plenty big enough for 50w.. prob rated for more like 95w.
plus they are one piece with the fan attached as well as clip to hold it on the board. you will probably have to use a copper shim tho.. as they have circular centers that are pretty small.


http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/nehalem/review/heatsinks2.jpg
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/nehalem/review/heatsinks3.jpg

[vapourminer]

We figured that was better than trying to shoehorn a new design into an existing pod with a specific heatsink shape. Rather than persisting in using the same proprietary chunk of metal, wouldn't it be better to make something that fits an existing fairly generic standard? The end result won't be as polished as a Gridseed or U3, but I'm not sure I'm really concerned about that.

I like it a lot as I have several coolers just collecting dust in my parts bin from upgrade cycles. most hardware addicts probably have the same.

[Mudbankkeith]

I have a box full of old Chili Miners fitted with Evo 212 coolers. That is a massive amount of over cooling, but very easy to install if the mounting holes are available.

They may even handle 50/60w as passive coolers, or low speed air in a cooling tower layout.

[QuintLeo]

Lotta stock AMD A-series and F-series HS/Fan out there too, most will easily handle 50 watts (the stock ones from my A10s are about the size as some I had on Thunderbird/XP series Athlons, many of which which were closer to 90 watts or so).

 I'll point to that Chili miner, which had both - it's NOT hard to do.


 Sadly, most of my "left over" spare HS/Fan are from the Pentium/K5/K6 days, some of the bigger ones would probably handle 50 watts but most folks don't have a ton of the old clip-style HS around any more so probably not worth trying to come up with a mount for THAT old of stuff.

[sidehack]

So, S7 is announced. Looks to be abandoning the standard S[odd] chassis and going for S5+ style. 3x18 string per board on three boards, with glued-on chipsinks and about 32A of 12V per board for around 1200W total in under 200 cubic inches and dual 4200RPM fans.

I really hope we can get sample chips from Bitmain to build the 30-chip board now, because there's going to be a lot of S3 retiring soon and nothing to do with them. Our 30-chip board won't have the hashing density of the S7 for sure (being as the S7 has 2.7 times the chips) but that means it'd run a heck of a lot more quietly. Oh and also you could overclock if you wanted and get up to 40GH per chip at 0.3W/GH for 2.4TH total, or underclock it to 20GH per chip at 0.2W/GH for 1.2TH total so it's a lot more flexible and, with bottom-clock accessibility, has a longer viable lifetime.

If we scale the price by chipcount directly off the S7 (as priced now), two of our boards would cost almost $700. Just as an off-the-cuff estimate, I bet we could beat $350 per pair of bare PCBs. You'd still need a retired machine for heatsinks and fans, and rig up a controller, but any way you fold it that's a good deal.

[VirosaGITS]

Sidehack, there's no way to reuse the S1/S3 board somehow? We'd have to rig up some PCB to USB and slap it on a RasPi?

[sidehack]

Please elaborate on the question.

[VirosaGITS]

Well you said we'd have to rig up a controller. We can't reuse the current controllers by flashing it or such?

If not, then, there's that project to run antminer PCBs on USB, so a RasPi would become the ideal controller. Or a spare PC. But regardless, i don't know how to plug PCBs strait to USB.

Do my concerns make more sense now?

[sidehack]

My boards would be USB-connected so you could hook them to anything with USB and cgminer (including the Pi). I'm opting not to use AntMiner controllers because they're built to work with a particular hardware spec and I'd rather go with an option that's a bit more universal.

I do need to follow up on the Antminer blade on USB project though, and see what's going on there. I'm about a year behind on the dev thread. That project is not directly relevant to this dev since the blades and controllers would not be reused, but they could sorta parallel nicely if someone wanted to strip miners, use the chassis for my boards, undervolt and underclock their old blades with a dozen running sinkless with a good fan and a Pi.

It's not that I had concerns, but your question was too vague for me to answer properly.

[VirosaGITS]

No problem, thank you for your answer. I somehow didn't imagine your boards would come with USB connectors.
That would do nicely, as plugging all of those in a USB hub and putting that in a RasPI or a old PC would be fairly convenient.

And if your board report temp, they could all be controlled as a single unit. So it could make managing the boards simple enough.

[sidehack]

Yep, all boards will have standard USB jacks. No proprietary wiring here. I've got parts inbound right now (probably arrive Monday, maybe Tuesday) for implementing the onboard controls - temperature monitoring (probably from at least two sensors sinked directly to chip planes), fan speed and voltage control. We might even implement some LEDs to report possible error conditions. I'll be building all this for the 4-chip pod first, but the systems will directly translate to the larger board. It's just easier to prototype on a less-complex system.

PWM fan control would happen on a per-board basis, so cgminer would talk to each board-level controller to spool fans. That means one controller could handle several sets of boards, each with fairly independent cooling. Novak wants to try and implement cgminer pushing speed/temp profiles to the controller instead of dictating fan speed directly, which would mean if cgminer ever dropped out the fans would keep going just the same. That'd be good if, for some unexpected reason we see with S4+ and S5, the chips keep working up a sweat after cgminer dies, the fans don't kick off and burn up your machine. There'd probably be a worst-case temp condition where if the thing detects a severe overtemp (probably 85-90C) it automatically powers down all the chips and doesn't start mining again until it's cooled to a safe temp (below 70C at most).

[sloopy]

OK I have been teased worse than my first girlfriend but in this case at least I know the happy ending is on the drawing board.

There have been some great ideas, but the most exciting are the standards being used and other ideas which will hopefully become standards.
It is fantastic to use USB where possible. I truly hope to see the ability to use S3 chassis with the BM1385 Gekkoscience product. I've just decided not to sell the 12 S3 and S3+ units I was about to put up in the marketplace. I haven't pulled them offline yet, but I am close. Even considering an investment in the future the return is minuscule compared to other offerings efficiency. The S7 price is high, but it is also 4.7x TH. That replaces a load of S3s. I think the market will be flooded with them.
I heated 2,600 sq ft with 8 S3, 4 S3+, 3 S4's from December to April and never ran the gas furnace. As a matter of fact I had to sleep with windows open on my end of the house when I added the two SP20s in January this year.

This winter, I plan to route the exhaust from all my miners in a central location to the house ductwork using a couple of inline fans. I need to put some thought in a damper to exhaust some though, as it will plainly be too hot on many days. Maybe there is a market for the Gekkoscience fully automated home heating / mining solution Seriously though, is there anything wrong with routing the heat through the duct to distribute it through the home more effectively?

Sidehack, to be more on topic here, I have done my best to keep up with this thread, the review thread, and the sales threads in the group buy section. Which thread / 1st page, is the best to stay on top of stick miner deliveries? I am sure I missed it before you start yelling, so forgive my impasse and point me the right direction please.

Further to the 1385 do I understand your comments correctly? You plan to allow for direct replacement of the S3 boards? It will be a drop in replacement? Bolt hole pattern and such? I know I read the initial thought was for possibly the S1, but I thought S3 to S1 pattern was slightly different? Again, I probably missed it, but I do read!

I want to be prepared for your products at every turn, so anything I can gather or keep from selling or throwing out?

Have you had any confirmation Bitmain will get at least a set of 1385 samples to you? Any eta?

[sidehack]

Heatsinks from the S1, S3 and S5 are all the same size with the same screws. I'm not sure if that's been mentioned in this thread twenty times or not yet, but it's probably close.

I probably won't build a GS mining furnace, but you might want to talk to PlanetCrypto. He's looking at doing something like that.

Don't get ahead of yourself. I can't guarantee I'll ever have an actual product available. It's going to depend on chip manufacturers cooperating, and also bringing in a lot of money for up-front costs of material purchases. If I do have this board going out it won't be until the end of the year.

Stickminer updates are in the stickminer sales thread in Group Buys.

[bmoscato]

Is Butmain hard to deal with when trying to purchase chips for prototyping? I'd assume that they don't like competition...

[sidehack]

They had no problems at all selling me BM1384 chips. I inquired about BM1385 after the chip was announced and was basically told to wait. It is understandable they didn't want any chips in the wild until they'd announced their own product, and now that the S7 has been released they might be more cooperative.

I'm not sure I see my boards as a direct competition for their S7, since it's not a complete product and it's also something quiet and sub-600W. The S5 was a stretch, but with the S7 they have as good as announced they no longer care about the needs of the S1/S3 customer base who want something comparably cool, quiet and reliable.

[RichBC]

Yep, all boards will have standard USB jacks. No proprietary wiring here. I've got parts inbound right now (probably arrive Monday, maybe Tuesday) for implementing the onboard controls - temperature monitoring (probably from at least two sensors sinked directly to chip planes), fan speed and voltage control.

Really hoping that Bitmain plays ball with the chip supply now that S7 is announced. Love the Spec of the BM1385 but the price of S7 is just too rich for me particularly with UK shipping & VAT etc. The other biggie for me after price is having Voltage Control.

Having now messed with an S3 with some digital pots on the potential divider and played with adjusting the voltage down on an S5 I just feel far more in control being able to match frequency & voltage. So I wonder what you have in mind for your BM1385 board? Are you going for a programmable VRM or do you have some other plan in mind?


Rich

[bmoscato]

Thanks for the reply.